The Discontented Cavalier

"This book is grounded in the assumption that Suckling, as an individual with a life history, was embedded in a particular set of historical and cultural circumstances that helped to shape his passage from precocious adolescence in the 1620s to untimely death in 1641. The focus is on the literary works - poems, plays, letters, and prose tracts - rather than on the man, although biographical facts supply one of the many contexts that help to make sense of the writings.^ A narrative and sequential structure is adopted as the most effective means of charting continuity and change in Suckling's literary activities and defining the orientation of the various kinds of text that he produced within the distinct but overlapping milieus and discourses that made up the Caroline world." "Recent advances in our understanding of social, political, and cultural aspects of the decade in which Suckling spent his adult life - from Charles I's dismissal of his third parliament in 1629 to the first year of the revolutionary Long Parliament elected in November 1640 - have made available new materials for a comprehensive reassessment of a writer who is mainly known for a few "Cavalier" lyrics.^ The discourses in which he participated, and which he often subverted, are established by reference to the work of such contemporaries as Carew, Davenant, Waller, Mennes, Cartwright, Shirley, Berkeley, Chillingworth, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and the complex nature of his engagement with Shakespeare and the courtier drama of his own age informs a radical re-reading of his four plays.^ The nine main chapters track his literary output through the various contexts that informed it: his close ties with the family of his uncle, Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex; his contacts with the tavern culture of clubs; his experiences in Europe as a soldier, traveler, and diplomat; his career as a wit and gamester in fashionable society; his largely satirical reaction to the fads in love and poetry at the Caroline court; his involvement with the intellectual and artistic communities that congregated Great Tew and Wrest; his participation in the campaigns against the Scots and the plot to rescue the Earl of Strafford.^ An epilogue charts the construction of "Suckling" into the hostile parliamentary stereotype of the "Cavalier" and then into the alternative royalist ideal of the cultivated courtier poet." "This detailed analysis of the work of one writer opens a window onto the social, political, and cultural complexity of the years preceding the outbreak of civil war and will appeal to students of both the literature and the history of the 1630s."--Jacket.